trauma
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Wounds Into Wisdom
Beloveds, today we turn toward a tender mystery: Why do we sometimes carry fears, reactions, and emotional patterns that we cannot fully explain? Why do some of us startle at joy, as if joy were something dangerous? Why do some of us feel the need to stay vigilant even when life is going well? Why…
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The title of my homily is “The Gospel of Finding Nemo.” I’m using that big theological word, “gospel,” intentionally because a “gospel” is a message that may tell a story about a particular person at a particular place and time, but there’s a story within that story, a deeper story which speaks universally and which…
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Four Noble Truths
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” A man named Socrates said that long, long ago. Do you believe it? That we diminish ourselves to the degree that we are apathetic about the truth, or that unconscious biases dictate how we see the world, or that we have a habit of confusing appearances with reality? …
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Paradise In This Life
The historic Universalist side of our religion says something powerful. It says, “Love the hell out of this world!” Say that with me: “Love the hell out of this world!” And we can do that, because, as Universalism teaches, hell is a human creation and therefore healed through human effort. Efforts of many kinds. Feeding…
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How to Be More Non-Judgmental
Today we are exploring judgmentalism and what can be done about it. Judgmentalism, as in: This must be distinguished from discernment, which enables us to be fair and reasonable in distinguishing between what is genuinely medicine and what is genuinely poison, what is truly helpful and what is truly harmful, who is honestly a friend…
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Mulla Nasruddin is a fictional character in the folklore of the Muslim world from the Balkans to China, and a hero of numerous stories. Like this one, on a day when he was invited to deliver a sermon to the faithful. Mulla Nasruddin steps into the pulpit, the first thing out of his mouth is,…
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We begin with the book by Fran Hawthorne entitled, The Overloaded Liberal: Shopping, Investing, Parenting, and Other Daily Dilemmas in an Age of Political Activism. She starts out with some humor shtick that sounds a whole lot like Jeff Foxworthy: You might be an overloaded liberal if … you hide the snack you brought to…
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Rabia of Basra has the distinction of being the first female Sufi mystic in the history of Islam. She lived around 1300 years ago, and one of her stories is about the time a robber broke into her home, and what happened next. The robber broke in, only to find that there was nothing worth…
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